BLADES slicing through the cold winter air, the men tasked with keeping us supplied with power over Christmas brought their helicopter down among the North Yorkshire hillsides to examine an overhead line.

The team, from CE Electric UK, were looking for problems which could potentially cast us into darkness, reporting them early so engineers can get to work.

"Firstly, we're looking for anything that could cause an outage, such as trees near the lines," said observer Ken Chisholm.

"The second thing we're looking for is change of use. A common example is a new fishing pond under the lines. The next thing you know there are fishermen there with carbon fibre rods looking for carp in danger of killing themselves. People think the lines are telephone lines and don't realise they're overhead power lines.

"The safety of the public is paramount to us."

The A350 Squirrel helicopter is one of four used by CE Electric UK to patrol their overhead power lines throughout the winter.

Observers and pilots will take off every flyable day until March, monitoring the company's 33,000 kilometres of overhead line.

"Every day we find something to report," said David Gill, customer liaison manager.

"Generally it's things in rural areas where things have been built that we're not aware of.

"Everything we're doing is to minimise disruption to our customers. All the investment is about identifying areas where we feel the customers' supply could be vulnerable and putting that right."

He added: "It's a great leap forward for us. With the satellite navigation systems we've got in the helicopters and the ones they've got on the ground we can easily pin point any problems and get straight to work on them."

Pilot Henry Ferris has been specially trained for low-level flying, sometimes hovering only 50-60 metres above the lines.

"We travel at between 20 and 40 miles per hour, sometimes coming to a stop because the observer wants look at the line," he said.

"Most of the time we're just looking down the line as you can generally see from a distance if there's something wrong."

In the case of an emergency telephone CE electric UK on 0800 668877

or 0800 375675.

Updated: 11:41 Friday, December 09, 2005